Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @09:10AM
from the and-boy-is-it-tired dept.

SomePgmr writes "The U.S Air Force's highly secret unmanned space plane will land in June — ending a year-long mission in orbit. The experimental Boeing X37-B has been circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour and was due to land in California in December. It is now expected to land in mid to late June. And still, no one knows what the space drone has been doing up there all this time."

But in a liberal libertarian society everyone gets their fair share of evilness plus the opportunity to contribute as much evil as back as they like. In such an environment, shared projects such as OpenEvil are free to flourish and take over the universe.

Setting a new government verified standard for "on-time" arrivals. After this benchmark; was due to land in California in December. It is now expected to land in mid to late June -- how can anyone complain about being a few hours late!

Nah, Google was just pretending to be helpless. If you look carefully at photos of this craft over the year you'll see one of Google's Streetview Vehicles constantly within standard wi-fi range of this craft. You know Microsoft and Facebook can't secure anything.

This is a drone that is designed to land. When a craft exits orbit and enters our atmosphere there have been three three styles of entries. There are those which burn up. There are those like the Soyuz, Dragon, and Apollo capsules. There was a space shuttle. The drone is obviously meant to reenter like the space shuttle in some fashion.

One thing that has been desirable has been to keep surveillance drones in flight for as long as possible. The longest shuttle mission was 17 days and 15 hours. This drone has been up there for a year before coming down.

The Chinese have demonstrated that they have the ability to shoot down satellites so a drone spy satellite that has good maneuverability in orbit would be a plus.

I think they're aiming to replace spy satellites with these drones and this was a test to see if a drone can stay up in space for a long duration and still arrive back on ground intact for repairs or to upgrade its system.

I think they're aiming to replace spy satellites with these drones and this was a test to see if a drone can stay up in space for a long duration and still arrive back on ground intact for repairs or to upgrade its system.

That's exactly what I think. Whatever is onboard the ship is almost irrelevant at this point, the cargo is a red herring (and it can change). The impressive capability of the ship, the "new thing" that it brings to the table, is that it is essentially a multi-purpose satellite that can return to earth and be launched again. Like you said, returning to earth would allow people to refuel, repair, offload whatever it collected in space, or upgrade it. If you have a refuelable satellite then you can afford to be less frugal with the maneuvering thrusters, meaning you can avoid anti-satellite weapons more effectively and move to different orbits. The one vehicle can support many missions, it could go up with optical equipment and do some surveillance, land again and get a new electronics package for a different mission, land again and get a weapons package. This is probably why the NRO just gave NASA two spy satellites. They don't need single-purpose satellites any more when they have one that they can land and upgrade.

One thing that has been desirable has been to keep surveillance drones in flight for as long as possible. The longest shuttle mission was 17 days and 15 hours. This drone has been up there for a year before coming down.

Yeah, because it was essentially a satellite in orbit around the earth. We already have spy satellites, and have had them for a lot longer than we have had drones.

The reason why we're using a lot of drones now, despite already having satellites, is because the drones can maintain a lengthy continuous presence over a specific location, rather than passing over that location at regular intervals in an orbit which can be discovered and then worked around. In terms of amount of time continuously observing an area of interest, this space plane has vastly lower numbers than any UAV -- just like all spy satellites.

If you are picturing this being used for surveillance, then what they showed is not a drone with an extremely long loiter time. It's a satellite with an extremely short orbital life span.

I think they're aiming to replace spy satellites with these drones and this was a test to see if a drone can stay up in space for a long duration and still arrive back on ground intact for repairs or to upgrade its system.

If the military has upgraded equipment they want to put in a spy satellite, they just launch a new one. They have no need to recover old ones (unlike back in the day when spy satellites used film), so they just let the old one deorbit.

To figure out what the X37 is for, we need to figure out why the military would need it back. Spy satellite doesn't fit the bill at all.

I think you're ignoring the massive power savings associated with the "unmanned" part. Consider: no lights, no air, hence no air heating/cooling nor fans, no human readable displays or control systems, everything on standby/power down unless actually in use, etc.

Am I safe in assuming the limitation of reactants was a usage issue rather than the reactants decaying to useless over time? We've seen stories of drones that should be able to stay in flight for months at a time with in flight refueling.

It was a quantity issue - even with drastically reduced electrical consumption, there was only so much available onboard. To overcome this limitation, they did develop a set of "buddy tanks [wikipedia.org]" that could be carried in the cargo bay.

In other news, Aristotle is suing you for infringing his intellectural property rights on fictional physics. Maintaining speed relative to another object does not, generally, require any continuous supply of additional energy. Free fall elliptical orbits are one example.

Oh be nice... that 7-figure UID can be a heavy burden to bear sometimes!

In other news: Positioning engines for course corrections due to space debris, other satellites and getting a better view of yo momma's house require plenty of energy so albeit a bit mis-guided his question is not completely without merit.

Well, we don't know the mission. If it was imaging that would of course take quite a bit of attitude control thrusters. Space debris is seriously overstated as a general problem in most orbits. The risk is real, but the cases where the debris has a well-enough known orbit that you can currently do anything about it are few, except for in a few specific bands.

This object has been followed on the seesat-l list, and IIRC from the observations there it did perform a good number of orbital maneuvers, including the possibly fuel-intensive plane change. This required more than needed for mere station-keeping.

nah, the geiger counter is no indication of radioactive material / nukes on board. You see, it turns out, most of the visible objects in outer space are actually humongous balls of radiation-emiting nuclear plasma. spacecraft are routinely dusted by bits of nuclear material. it's also possible (at least theoretically) for atoms bombarded by radiation to transmute into radioactive isotopes themselves. it's probably a good idea to wear a hazmat suit when approaching any spacecraft recently returned from long periods away from atmoshperic shielding.

If you've ever watched a Shuttle landing to the point where they're letting the crew out, the first people to arrive are the fire trucks, then folks in Hazmat suites to make sure that there is no unreacted hydrazine (from the Reaction Control System) leaking around. It's very, very volatile. The XB-37 Wikipedia article describes shifting the main engine off the hydrogen perioxide (which at the concentrations used is pretty nasty stuff in and of itself) but they may still have hydrazine for the control thrusters.

Besides, they look cool and let you know that the Air Force means business.

17,000 miles per hour, I guess that's something like 30,000 km/h? That seems pretty fast to me. How much fuel did that consume, and how did they provide it with fuel for a whole year?

Travelling through orbital space ain't like dusting crops, boy! It doesn't take any fuel at all. Look at the Moon, for example. It's been in orbit an awfully long time, but how long has it been since it was fuelled up?

It consumed roughtly 737,400lbs of fuel, minus the weight of the Atlas V rocket (so 500,000 lbs of fuel?) to get it in orbit. To orbit the earth at an altitude above the non-negligible atmosphere, you need to travel at around 17,000mph or more. This is roughly the same speed the Shuttle, ISS, Dragon capsule, Hubble, et all are moving. The rocket puts it in orbit at that speed. I think once in orbit, about 6 months in to it's mission, it did an orbital course correction, which if done at the correct time, requires surprisingly little fuel to do.

Whats better than having nukes on the ground, then having them in space, easily deploy-able at the push of a button (and a 20 second delay), to wipe out enemies. secret missions could have hundreds of these orbiting the globe with armed warheads for years with none the wiser.

or

the could be part of an missile intercept program to take down ICMB's...

Nukes in space has been possible for 50 years. We don't do it because there are treaties against it, treaties that have remarkably been followed by all involved. It's not a a boat that anyone involved really wants to start rocking.

Nukes in space has been possible for 50 years. We don't do it because there are treaties against it, treaties that have remarkably been followed by all involved. It's not a a boat that anyone involved really wants to start rocking.

It's not so much that there has been any great restraint on the part of the nuclear armed space powers as that there is no point to having them in orbit. ICBMs get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes, SLBMs are even quicker since they are closer. Silos are very well hardened and subs are hard to find- orbiting satellites have limited maneuverability, so you always know where the warhead is. A good chunk of the time orbital dynamics is going to say you're out of position to even hit your desired target. Plus, stuff in space can't be maintained easily and warheads need occasional maintenance to do things like replace the tritium boosters and check the electronics.

It's not so much that there has been any great restraint on the part of the nuclear armed space powers as that there is no point to having them in orbit. ICBMs get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes

AHA! This is the meat of the matter. The countries actually capable of deploying an ICBM (or a missile sub) don't need nukes in space — we have ICBMs. The other countries can't get out from under our thumbs sufficiently to put nukes in space; if they could put a nuke in space, they could build an ICBM.

How secret can it be if we know it happened? What we really have to worry/consider are the things that we never even know happen, not just "don't know their purpose."

If the general community know that this 'secret' spaceplane was up there doing stuff, then you can guarantee that it wasn't doing anything sensitive, though possibly classified. When they do really important and secret things, you can guarantee that we never even know it happened at all.

I think he does.Classified, means just that classified.It may be classified noforn in which case only US citizens may see the whatever it is.It may be classified secret, or top secret, or TS<codeword>.In all the above cases it is also sensitive.It could also be classified as unrestricted (like NASA pictures of the deep cosmos), still classified, but not sensitive.

There is material that is born secret, and there is material that is classified secret, but classification is just that, putting the materia

No, it's not. In this context, "classified" is not the same thing as the generic English word classified, "to put something in a class." In the context of US Government vernacular, classified means FOUO, secret, or above. It is NOT to be disseminated and explicitly carries with it the idea that leaking it will cause harm to someone or something relating to the USA.

Ah but you're missing the fact that in the ops world Sensitive has its own meaning.

i work on machines all the time that are labeled quite clearly "Sensitive But Unclassified". It would seem by your definition those machines (or more importantly their contents) had been Classified 'Sensitive' BUT the words tell you quite the opposite. Feel free to explode in a cloud of logic now...

By at least the 3-letter acronyms that I work for anything that has been "Classified" is above the level of "Sensitive", "Sensi

Maybe the purpose of the mission is precisely to make the general community wonder what it is doing up there? To provide an environment for rumors and propaganda about our capabilities designed to scare our enemies? Not really too far-fetched. Besides, it's pretty difficult to hide something in orbit from the millions of amateur astronomers on the Internet, so better to let out the story that is is NOT a nuclear warhead than let the speculations get too carried away. Beyond that, what it's doing is stil

They tried keeping spy satellites secret in the past. Unfortunately, solar panels and Summer evenings are a bit of a giveaway. Once somebody sees that flash of light, next thing they are taking out their telescope, camera and taking photographs.

2. Amateur astronomers like to make a game out of "spot the spy satellite"The price of technology is coming down and the processing power of computers has going up.More than enough to allow the hobbyist to spot "secret" satellites.

Give it another generation and the words "secret satellite" will no longer be used together.

There are only a very limited number of things that a satellite can do:1) Look up at the sky2) Look down at the ground3) Relay data4) Come back down again (i.e., as a weapon, perhaps with a warhead)

Seeing as that first category is pretty innocent and will most likely be non-secret (science is for bragging rights as much as anything else), that only really leaves three varieties of sinister purpose. It's also probably pretty much a given that every space-faring government does items 2 & 3 in large quanti

5) drop something, like a crowbar6) fire a directed energy weapon at another satellite7) maneuver and rendezvous with another orbiting body8) detonate and spread debris throughout orbit

I bet there's a few hundred possibilities I'm missing, but doubling the length of your list without even getting fanciful (like directed energy weapon pointed at the ground, or orbital mind control lasers or something) was trivial.

it's in the DoD's best interest for people to believe they are in posession of secret and unimaginable technological wonders. I think it's highly dubious (and optimistic, in my experience in this industry) to subscribe to the (conveniently non-falsifiable) notion that the U.S. military keeps all their most impressive toys 100% hidden from view. in fact, i suspect the opposite is closer to the truth.

The secret stuff generally gets declassified, so the hypothesis is not non-falsifiable. In fact, it's easily testable. Just look back thirty years at what was commonly available, what the government was thought to be up to, and what they actually had. It turns out they probably didn't have magic UFO technology, but they did have things like stealth that were quite a bit beyond what was commonly available. Extrapolating, the US military probably has some interesting capabili

What we really have to worry/consider are the things that we never even know happen, not just "don't know their purpose."

Obligatory Rumsfeld quote:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

That's just stupid, space is empty. It's about as hard to hide a spacecraft as it is to hide a supercarrier, it's not that it's there which is a secret but what it can do. The military isn't ostrich stupid, they don't stick their head in the sand and pretend nobody else can see it either. Just like you can't hide a nuclear detonation anymore, anything that doesn't happen in a simulator will get picked up by seismographs. And yes, they register different than earthquakes.

Just because you know that a spy exists and is doing something does not mean that you know what they are doing. That's how it can still be secret and why it still is secret. Yes, we know it's up there, but we have no idea what it's actually doing while it's up there.

Because the last time photos of technicians working on a spacecraft, wearing Hawaiian shirts, shorts and flip-flops was leaked, Congress thought they weren't taking their job seriously and threatened to cut funding.

Same reason aircraft carrier crews paint over the mini golf course on the deck before returning to port.

While you jab at journalists is certainly reasonable, you don't sound all that smart yourself.

Yes, people wear hazmat-type suits for nucular stuff all the time. Look at all the Fukashima pictures. The reason for that is that alpha particles are often attached to dusts and other floaty particles and one should avoid internalizing them. While you could potentially deal with that with just a gas mask (breathing being the most likely route) it's typically felt that swathing the person in Tyvek or whatnot is

Seriously, biosuits and cleanroom suits are the norm in space related activities.It's no different than the (don't know the official name of the position) guy who dumps fuel in the race cars wearing a full nomex suit and protective gear. There is a well above non zero chance of exposure to flammable liquid or fire, so you protect against it.-nB

... don't know the official name of the... guy who dumps fuel in the race cars....

If it were the space program, he'd be the Propellant Installation Engineer.If he were in a union he'd be a Flammable Fluids Expert.In the military, he'd be a Motorcraft Refueling Technician.But this is auto racing we're talking about, so we just call him the Fueler.

I talked to someone who saw the Dream Chaser [wikipedia.org] space plane undergoing air tests north of Boulder. Its one of four private manned vehicles in first-round development funded by NASA. I hear its supposed to be drop-tested from SpaceShipTwo later this year.

The US military has had an open goal of expanding its capabilities to kill targets selectively with as little delay as possible. All the gadgetry to achieve real-time eyes-on intelligence on a potential target (like the late UBL) can be worthless if it takes an hour or more to mobilize a strike against it and the target slips away. Having a potential weapons platform already up in the air 24/7 for a year at a time can cut the response time significantly. And if you are hindered by the fixed orbit, like spy

My guess is the whole point of the space-plane is that it can easily land, refuel, reload, and get back in orbit. Therefore they can afford to have a larger fuel reserve for orbital maneuvers and you need fewer total craft in the sky to have strike-anywhere capability. Satellites could afford much more maneuvers if they were only expected to stay up for a year at a time rather than the decade(s) that many do now.

Actually, the biggest reason for being able to maneuver on orbit is stealth. It is much hard